This story appears in the December 9, 2012 issue of Forbes. Subscribe
When owners of a Makerbot 3-D printer need a shirt button or a cold-air intake for their Porsche 928, they don't pull out a sewing kit or call a German chop shop. Instead, they flip on their printer and download the object of their desire from the Web.
In September the Brooklyn, N.Y. firm Makerbot started selling the $2,200 Replicator 2, its latest and most polished 3-D printer, a machine that extrudes ultrafine strands of heated plastic in layers to turn software models into detailed, solid objects just as easily as a traditional printer turns a Word document into ink on a page. It's already sold 2,000 of the new devices, which, added to the 13,000 earlier models sold, makes Makerbot the most successful consumer 3-D printer company around.
But the less visible ingredient behind Makerbot's success has been Thingiverse, its online collection of software models that encompasses everything its users can imagine.
Anyone who buys a Makerbot can immediately download and print any of Thingiverse's 25,000 designs. Those with the software skills to create new designs and upload them to the site are rewarded with hacker fame and remixes from others in the digital DIY community. And every new blueprint on the site boosts the utility of the machines sold so far.
One user has uploaded more than 230 faces scanned with his Xbox Kinect. Three Thingiversers have uploaded engagement rings. (All three advertise that their proposals were accepted.) "It's a way for users to inspire and be inspired, a way to make Makerbot operators into superstars," says the company's founder, Bre Pettis, a rockabilly geek with gray hair and thick-rimmed glasses with frames that have been downloaded 75 times at last count. "This is an important thing for creative people everywhere, and there's nothing else like it."
On Nov. 7 Thingiverse relaunched with a flashier user interface and more social features. But even prior to its redesign its store of uploaded blueprints doubled since the beginning of the year, with 8.5 million downloads and half a million since August, far more than any other consumer 3-D printing platform. That's helped Makerbot attract $10 million in investment from Foundry Partners, Amazon's Jeff Bezos and others.
Makerbot could easily use Thingiverse's network effects to put the squeeze on its competitors like Stratasys or the open-source project RepRap. Instead it's opted to host Makerbot-incompatible designs, too. Pettis says that openness has been part of the site's philosophy since 2008--a year before Makerbot was even founded--when he and fellow Thingiverse creator Zach Smith built the site in an hour one Saturday afternoon. "We keep it open because it feels right," says Pettis. "There's no downside to sharing it. All the competitors are going to make stuff and share on Thingiverse, too, and that just benefits our community."
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With 3-D printing in its infancy, Makerbot is wise to expand the user base rather than steal users from competitors. According to Deloitte, the industry remains under $200 million in sales but is expected to at least double annually for the next few years. And a site like Thingiverse serves as a key ingredient for getting the devices out of the hacker community and into the mainstream, says Deloitte analyst Duncan Stewart.
But Pettis' and Thingiverse's dream of pure openness may be just that. A quick browse through the site turns up plenty of potentially trademarked or copyrighted designs, like an Iron Man helmet or figurines from Star Wars and the videogame Doom. The site has already had to remove several designs after receiving takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And the first rumblings of a rights-management system for controlling the sharing of physical things are appearing: The IP-hoarding firm Intellectual Ventures received a patent in October for a 3-D printer feature that blocks the creation of verboten objects.
Thingiverse has yet to face an intellectual property lawsuit over the infringing content its users upload, like the $1 billion tort that Viacom threw at Google's YouTube service in 2007. The lawsuit, which is still ongoing, has cost Google millions in legal bills and pushed it to adopt its own proactive copyright protections. The intellectual property laws around software designs for physical things have yet to be hammered out, but Makerbot remains determined to avoid censoring content unless it's absolutely required to. "For now, it's an exciting time," says Pettis. "Things aren't ruled by copyright."
The hairiest problems around Makerbot's 3-D design encyclopedia, in fact, may be ethical, not legal. Despite a clause in Thingiverse's terms of use that bans uploading any design that "contributes to the creation of weapons, illegal materials, or is otherwise objectionable," the site hosts a slew of blueprints for edgy objects that toe that line or cross it: secret keys to high-security handcuffs, realistic toy guns or, scarier still, restricted gun components that can be combined with mail-order parts to create a working AR-15 semi-automatic weapon. One group calling itself Defense Distributed hopes to create a file for a gun capable of shooting a .22 caliber bullet and may upload its final design to Thingiverse.
Pettis has treated the appearance of those objects on the site as inevitable--almost out of his control. "The cat is out of the bag," Pettis wrote in a blog post to the Thingiverse community last year, addressing the presence of weapon components on the site. "And that cat can be armed with guns made with printed parts."
Other 3-D printing companies haven't been so liberal: Shapeways, a Dutch firm that prints objects on demand for users, won't print a gun replica beyond 10 centimeters in length. The 3-D printer maker Stratasys went so far as to seize a 3-D printer it had rented to the gunsmiths at Defense Distributed when it found out how they were planning it use it.
When asked directly about hosting controversial objects on Thingiverse, Pettis tenses up. "We're not Big Brother. We live in America." Then he punts the question to Michael Weinberg, a lawyer at the nonprofit Public Knowledge who has written on digital rights and 3-D printing.
Even Weinberg says Thingiverse needs to clarify what it will and won't help users bring into reality, but with 3-D printing in such early stages it's too early to make rules: "It's hard to do a line-drawing exercise today that's future-proof for even six months," Weinberg says.
Not even the site that wants to let anyone make anything can predict the shape of things to come.
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